:Jaws: contains a partial list of smaller breeders which should either be updated or instead reference a single list as I proposed in discussion of :mosquito5: above. The growth rate is not mentioned. Perhaps: "A {breeder} constructed by Nick Gotts in February 1997 which exhibits quadratic growth. The same comment applies to the mosquito entries.

A review of 'I':

:inductor: does not refer to :gutter:. Not sure that it needs to, because the current wording is probably better than something like "Any oscillator with a {gutter} down the middle ..."

:infinite growth: states "Nick Gotts and Paul Callahan have also shown that there is no infinite growth pattern with fewer than 10 cells, so that _the_ question has now been answered." Remove "the". Also, is there a date for this proof?

A review of 'H':

:Herschel: contains a reference to end of 2017 (already fixed?)

:Herschel loop: needs to be updated to reflect the recently discovered p52 loop.

:Herschel track: Is this the same as :Herschel circuit:?

Other:

As for :Herschel loop:, :emu: should also include p52 in list of flightless herschel loop periods.

Are :circuit: and :track: synonymous? If they aren't I can't discern the difference aside from the alternate meaning discussed for track.

The latest version of the 5S Project contains over 226,000 spaceships. There is also a GitHub mirror of the collection. Tabulated pages up to period 160 (out of date) are available on the LifeWiki.

:Herschel loop: needs to be updated to reflect the recently discovered p52 loop.

As for :Herschel loop:, :emu: should also include p52 in list of flightless herschel loop periods.

Here's an attempt at an update. I included period 52 in the list of emu periods, but I'm not entirely sure it really belongs there: does a signal loop count as a "Herschel loop" as long as there's a Herschel in the loop somewhere -- even if the signal turns into a triplet of gliders at several points?

-- Or is a loop made out of four Snarks also an emu, since it shares the same annoying problem of being "flightless"? It would certainly be nice to be able to extract over-unity gliders right down to p43. So maybe the "emu" definition should be expanded to "signal loops" instead of just "Herschel loops". (?)

Revised draft definition for "Herschel loop":

:Herschel loop: A cyclic {Herschel track}. Although no loop of length less than 120 generations has been constructed it is possible to make {oscillator}s of smaller periods by putting more than one Herschel in a higher-period track. In this way oscillators, and in most cases {gun}s, of all periods from 54 onwards can now be constructed (although the p55 case is a bit strange, shooting itself with gliders in order to stabilize itself). A mechanism for a period-52 loop was found in April 2018, but it includes stages where the signal is carried by triplets of {glider}s so it may not be considered to be a pure Herschel loop. The missing period, 53, is a difficult case simply because 53 is prime and so no small sparkers or reflectors are available.
See {Simkin glider gun} and {p256 gun} for the smallest known Herschel loops. See also {emu} and {omniperiodic}.

:Herschel loop: needs to be updated to reflect the recently discovered p52 loop.

As for :Herschel loop:, :emu: should also include p52 in list of flightless herschel loop periods.

Here's an attempt at an update. I included period 52 in the list of emu periods, but I'm not entirely sure it really belongs there: does a signal loop count as a "Herschel loop" as long as there's a Herschel in the loop somewhere -- even if the signal turns into a triplet of gliders at several points?

Please feel free to ignore my suggestions when they don't make sense! I remembered the p52 loop being posted when I read the entry and to be honest I didn't even run the pattern or consider whether it qualified as a Herschel loop or an emu. However, I think your draft makes sense - the signals in the p52 loop are predominantly Herschels, though you do then have a hazy definition for what qualifies as a Herschel loop.

I looked through 'G' and didn't find any issues of note aside from a few references to 2017. Perhaps someone else can review the :glider synthesis: entry as that's such an active and large topic. It may be worthwhile adding some more content about the current state of glider synthesis technology - particularly for spaceships.

Also, can someone verify the truthiness of this statement in :glider duplicator: "Glider duplicators and turners are known for backward gliders using p2 c/2 spaceships, and for forward gliders using p3 c/3 spaceships." I'd be surprised if there are no c/3 glider duplicators or turners for backward gliders, but I have no idea whether or not they exist.

----

I guess we're getting down to the wire for including further corrections to v29 in Golly. Is there a date for checkin of final v29 version?

The latest version of the 5S Project contains over 226,000 spaceships. There is also a GitHub mirror of the collection. Tabulated pages up to period 160 (out of date) are available on the LifeWiki.

wildmyron wrote:I looked through 'G' and didn't find any issues of note aside from a few references to 2017. Perhaps someone else can review the :glider synthesis: entry as that's such an active and large topic. It may be worthwhile adding some more content about the current state of glider synthesis technology - particularly for spaceships.

Yeah, the history of spaceship synthesis is good as far as it goes, but it stops in 2003... For Release 30 it would probably be worth mentioning in each relevant spaceship article the discoverer and date of all the recent glider syntheses.

wildmyron wrote:I guess we're getting down to the wire for including further corrections to v29 in Golly. Is there a date for checkin of final v29 version?

Yes! It was early this morning -- at least as long as no one finds awful horrible problems before Andrew gets around to a Golly 3.2 release build.

... Except I noticed this morning that my manual post-processing notes weren't updated with Sokwe's correction to the single-page :spaceship: table, so it still links to 25P3H1V0.2 instead of 25P3H1V0.1. (Not a problem for the Golly multi-page HTML.) So I'll have to do a little quick patching and rebuilding ZIP files in the next few days, and do another checkin before moving things over to conwaylife.com/ref/lexicon.

Anybody see anything else I broke? Other little stuff can get rolled into the same patch.

dvgrn wrote:...noticed this morning that my manual post-processing notes weren't updated with Sokwe's correction to the single-page :spaceship: table, so it still links to 25P3H1V0.2 instead of 25P3H1V0.1. (Not a problem for the Golly multi-page HTML.) So I'll have to do a little quick patching and rebuilding ZIP files in the next few days, and do another checkin before moving things over to conwaylife.com/ref/lexicon.

Anybody see anything else I broke? Other little stuff can get rolled into the same patch.

The patch to the single-page :spaceship: table is done, so the single-page preview should be correct now, and should exactly match what's in Golly.

That's probably a wrap for Life Lexicon Release 29, 2018 July 2, at least unless some really annoying little typo shows up that it's worth patching directly in the various HTML files, rather than waiting for the next full build. Otherwise I'll probably plan on getting a review of A through G done by the end of 2018. Will try to keep up with editing in new details that need updating between now and then... and that will become Release 30.

I know patching the html version is the wrong way round but even so, here is a patch for the first two issues against Golly's source code. I'm not expecting this to get in for 3.3, but if it does that's a bonus.

I can't find any reference to 84P3H1V0 other than Dean's email to the Golly list, so this one isn't quite so easy. I presume it needs an entry in the Lexicon and then updates to c/3 in the table of spaceship speeds as well as :25P3H1V0.1

The latest version of the 5S Project contains over 226,000 spaceships. There is also a GitHub mirror of the collection. Tabulated pages up to period 160 (out of date) are available on the LifeWiki.

Thanks very much for the reminder and the 2/3 patch! I've been away on a no-wifi-available vacation for the last week or so. I'll try to get fixes for these three issues checked in to Golly in the next few days.

Near-Future Lexicon Plans
I haven't done much with the Lexicon lately, because a pile of other items on my Life to-do list have been taking priority. Subconsciously I'm probably thinking that if the Lexicon gets a year or two out of date, that's still a big improvement over being a decade-and-change out of date.

I've been keeping the latest no-word-wrap text edition of the Life Lexicon on Google Drive, shared so far with David Bell and Apple Bottom since they contributed a lot of new wording and various useful fixes to Release 29. It's probably high time to join the modern age, and make the current To Be Done notes available in a Git repository somewhere, as well as the absolute-latest text Lexicon (from which the single-page, multi-page, and Golly HTML versions are semi-automatically built).

New Lexicographer(s) Wanted
If anyone is interested in taking over the Lexicon update project, by the way, please let me know. It shouldn't be nearly as much work as it was to get from 2006 to 2017-18 -- not that that's saying much. Nowadays it's possible to do a decent new Lexicon version just by reviewing the News archive on LifeWiki since the last update, and adding definitions for any new terminology that shows up there or in Pattern of the Year contest nominations.

The associated project of double-checking that new information from the Lexicon has made it to the LifeWiki -- preferably in somewhat more depth, with associated LifeViewer embedded patterns, links, and references -- is much farther from completion. New Lexicon articles are all present in some form in the LifeWiki, but they may be in need of standardization, and there's a long list of articles that should be reviewed to make sure there's nothing new in the Lexicon entry that should be in the wiki article, or vice versa.

I've been keeping the latest no-word-wrap text edition of the Life Lexicon on Google Drive, shared so far with David Bell and Apple Bottom since they contributed a lot of new wording and various useful fixes to Release 29. It's probably high time to join the modern age, and make the current To Be Done notes available in a Git repository somewhere, as well as the absolute-latest text Lexicon (from which the single-page, multi-page, and Golly HTML versions are semi-automatically built).

This would be awesome. And both Github and Gitlab have good web-based workflows that make reviewing and merging pull requests etc. a breeze.

The associated project of double-checking that new information from the Lexicon has made it to the LifeWiki -- preferably in somewhat more depth, with associated LifeViewer embedded patterns, links, and references -- is much farther from completion. New Lexicon articles are all present in some form in the LifeWiki, but they may be in need of standardization, and there's a long list of articles that should be reviewed to make sure there's nothing new in the Lexicon entry that should be in the wiki article, or vice versa.

On that note, anyone who's active on the wiki should feel absolutely free to edit this page (and whatever subpages it may have) as well; even though it lives below my userpage, it's really for general coordination.

(While I'm on the soapbox, I figure I might as well say I regret having to admit that both my free time and my enthusiasm for LifeWiki work have dwindled sufficiently that I'm not doing any of the latter anymore, not that this hasn't been obvious. And that's unlikely to change anytime soon. I do apologize for the sudden disappearance, but as they say --- life has a funny way of sneaking up on you when you think everything's okay and everything's going right.)

If you speak, your speech must be better than your silence would have been. — Arabian proverb

It's probably high time to join the modern age, and make the current To Be Done notes available in a Git repository somewhere, as well as the absolute-latest text Lexicon (from which the single-page, multi-page, and Golly HTML versions are semi-automatically built).

This would be awesome. And both Github and Gitlab have good web-based workflows that make reviewing and merging pull requests etc. a breeze.

Well, let's see how it goes. The Life Lexicon no-wrap plaintext source is now in a shiny new Git repository, broken up by letter.

For anyone who passes the entrance exam and gets added as a collaborator to this repo, it might turn out to be easiest to do most of the necessary editing directly in a browser window, and commit directly to the master branch. But we do have the option now of having multiple people create local repositories and edit definitions locally, with all the associated fun of rebasing, checking in, merging and addressing conflicts, pushing to the remote repository, and doing pull requests.

Splitting up the monolithic text file into 26+3 pieces was intended to make it less likely for merge conflicts to occur in multi-editor situations. See the notes at the top of the monolithic file for an explanation of how I'm hoping this will all work. Basically it's just going to be necessary to string the 29 sub-files together again before running Stephen Silver's compiler utility against it.

... Of course, I'm not at all sure that this theoretical "multi-editor" pie-in-the-sky hopeful stuff will really pan out. I'd really like to get a Release 30 out by the end of the year, mostly covering new material from 2018... before the 2019 Pattern of the Year competition comes along and adds a bunch more new entries.

However, there are several other higher-priority Life-related projects on my current to-do list, so I only have just so much time to wrestle with new Lexicon definitions. Anyone who might be interested in helping out, please let me know here!

Hmm, this error was already mentioned in July 2018 and thereafter mentioned to be fixed...

So maybe that /ref/ page isn't up-to-date with the Github of the Lexicon?

I'm still not sure what happened there exactly. The source text (now stored here and here) definitely got fixed when I said it did, but somehow Golly 3.3 ended up with a lex_s HTML file without that fix. There are just a few too many manual stages in the update and checkin process, so it's easy for bugs like this to creep in and hide in various files that were supposed to be already fixed.

Anyway, I've checked in a correction to the two copies of the Lexicon in Golly's codebase, and to the nine different files (!) in rokicki/lifecontent where the typo was still immortalized. The next build of Golly should no longer contain that particular mistake, finally.

I'm hoping that somebody will get around to a Release 30 of the Lexicon for the next Golly version anyway, though. If I end up having to do that update, no doubt I'll find a way to include a few new typos that will take more years to fix.